Recorded Events

Past Events

Five important things needed to spend money efficiently on saving threatened species

Richard Maloney

Senior Scientist, Department of Conservation (DOC), New Zealand

When there are different ideas about the level, focus and certainty of threatened species recovery, there will be no single right answer about how to undertake the work. This leads to confusion over what actions to take first, and where to apply collective conservation effort. If there isn’t enough money to do everything we will fail to meet recovery goals – something will miss out, populations will decline, and perhaps some unwanted extinctions will occur. For most conservation agencies and countries, such failures are hard to acknowledge. Yet methods of consistently and transparently applying robust decision making processes designed to maximize recovery within limited resources are rarely applied at regional or national levels. Dr. Maloney describes how the Department of Conservation (DOC) in New Zealand (responsible for conservation of marine and freshwater environments, recovery of threatened species, and support of recreation and historic values on conservation lands), has been grappling with this issue over the last decade, and he will illustrate what is particularly important in helping us better deliver our share of global threatened species recovery.

Dr. Maloney's background is a mix of threatened species conservation, reintroductions and habitat management, particularly in braided rivers and dry-lands environment. He is the lead science advisor for black stilt, an endangered wading bird with 70 wild adults remaining. His MSc in zoology attempted to train NZ robins to recognize and respond to introduced mammalian predators, and his PhD was on the reintroduction and breeding ecology of houbara bustards, which he did while working on conservation projects in the Saudi Arabian desert. In the last decade Dr. Maloney led work for DOC in setting outcome based objectives for all natural heritage work and for cost efficiently prioritizing national resources for all threatened species. He has been involved in similar work in the states of Tasmania and New South Wales in Australia.